Server Move

Update: Our server move is complete! Everything looks great on our new hardware, with all bugs squashed and our average response time holding at a blazingly fast 40ms =)

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

--------------------

We have been notified by our hosting provider (SoftLayer) that the pod our servers are located on needs upgrades, and we are being required to move our servers.

We have been working on this for the past few weeks to ensure a smooth transition and plan to initiate the move on Friday July 6th. Due to the size of Shivtr's database, we expect the transfer to take about 8 hours to complete.

If your site uses a Shivtr subdomain, such as *.shivtr.com or *.wowhordes.com, you won't need to do anything. Once the move is complete your site will simply be running on our new, shiny hardware!

However, if your site uses a custom domain name, you will need to update its IP address to point to our new server. When we begin the transfer, the old server will display a maintenance message, with a note showing our new ip address and help on how to update your domain name.

If you have any questions on this feel free to ask below, or email us at support@shivtr.com

37 Comments

Yes we are getting enterprise grade SSDs as part of our new server, where the current server is on older disk drives. Also getting newer CPUs and RAM, so performance should see a pretty big boost =)

0 Likes

Adellwyna· 9 months ago

Does this mean the sites will all be down during the transfer? Or will there be no interruption?

0 Likes

Staff

8 Toes· 9 months ago

Aye we expect about 8 hours of downtime during this transfer as we have to move the database.

This is our first major downtime in several years, and a bit out of our hands as our data center is forcing us to move. But normally, we rarely have downtime, and most updates are hot patched without requiring downtime =)

Cheers,

0 Likes

downwitheggs· 9 months ago

"However, if your site uses a custom domain name, you will need to update its IP address to point to our new server." What new server do you mean? Will it not be .shivtr anymore?

0 Likes

Staff

8 Toes· 9 months ago

What this means is, if you use a custom domain such as myguild.com, you set it to point to our servers IP address. When we move servers, this IP is changing, so you would need to update where your domain name points to, so it works from the new server.

If your guild is at a Shivtr subdomain, such as myguild.shivtr.com, you won't need to do anything =) All Shivtr subdomains will be automatically updated to point to the new servers IP address.

Cheers,

0 Likes

d.ann07· 9 months ago

I may have missed this in the post, what time (approximate) will this be occurring on the 6th?

also with some of the changes happening, will ESO guilds have added features to their sites that are integrated with the game?

thank you for your time! have a great day!

0 Likes

Staff

8 Toes· 9 months ago

We plan to start early friday (maybe 9-10am EST)

For ESO specific features, we like adding game specific options, but typically the game devs need to make some data available for us to access (like how wow has the armory, server status, server alerts, etc. all available for us to provide features for).

If ESO has some content like this you can notify us specifically for this game with our "Request a Feature" link for ESO in our games db here - http://games.shivtr.com/games/83 =)

Cheers,

0 Likes

Ula Vii· 9 months ago

Thanks for the update 8 Toes, good luck with the move 👍

0 Likes

d.ann07· 9 months ago

Thanks for the information & prompt response! Have a great week/weekend! = )

0 Likes

Ula Vii· 9 months ago

Pages seem to load much faster now including when you click Edit on an event 👍

0 Likes

Ula Vii· 9 months ago

I've noticed a few design elements have changed recently. Are you doing things in the background? 4 that I noticed are:

1) The site background vanished so I had to edit the CSS to update the path. I had used the absolute link from the theme editor in another area of the custom CSS so had to update it to match the new location.2) The old "Paypal Donate" button path changed so I had to update that in my custom donations text block. Same fix as #1. Both these two worked until the IP change.3) The left/right paging controls in the admin audit log are no longer clickable (In FireFox Win10). Visually they look correct but they are just not clickable. The dropdown box paging control is clickable.4) The paging controls on the front-end site applications are messed up and no longer match those on the forum (which still display correctly).

Just noticed the same paging control change as the site applications is on multi page site emails as well.

I'm only asking if you changed it so I know if you've finished and I can go tinker with the custom CSS to make them fit the site theme. Don't want to tinker and then have to re-tinker in a few days.

0 Likes

Staff

8 Toes· 8 months ago

Hi Ula,

Thanks for reporting the pagination link issues, these are all now fixed =)

For your paypal btn, and likely your site background, our assets have a digest value assigned to them, basically a long random string, and this may change whenever we update our assets; its used to force update cache on Amazon Cloudfront, so direct links to these assets are not likely to always exist...

(we don't typically update all assets, but we did here since we moved servers)

Thanks again for these reports, and if you notice any further issues please let me know =)

1 Like

Ula Vii· 8 months ago

Thank you, looks great.

Have another feature request... on the Audit Log can you allow us to search by email address please? (partial word matching is even better) It will make it easier to spot people that we have banned from guild who keep making accounts like this guy today who made another 5 accounts... An IP ban won't work for him as he lives in a shared house with other people that are still in our guild who are not trolls like him 😅

0 Likes

Ula Vii· 8 months ago

Found another area where the paging controls look goofy; comments on events:

You probably already know this but just in case, I've noticed after the move when entering DKP if adding a player to multiple entries (such as start to finish, hours, bonus, items) it creates duplicate entries and counts them as additional raiders. It makes DKP entry a bit of a chose now and it also skews the number of raiders we had in a raid (should be in the 20's-30's but now in the 70's-100's.) =P

Thanks!

0 Likes

Staff

8 Toes· 8 months ago

Thanks for reporting this, this is now fixed =)

0 Likes

Unclouded· 8 months ago

Hello, Shivtr Comunnity and Shivtr development staff. First of all, great work so far!

Came here to notify of a "bug" that I don't know how to solve - in our page applications (it's a World of Warcraft Guild, so we recruit by applies) you can't choose Druid as your class, so people are getting a bit confused about that. Any fix?

Thanks, and keep up the good work!

0 Likes

Staff

8 Toes· 8 months ago

If you first choose a race that can play Druid, Druid should appear =)

0 Likes

Ula Vii· 8 months ago

Found a problem with the admin Design->Layouts section. I created a new layout and clicked Pages to pick the page to apply it to (as I've done lots of times before). I tick the page name I want and then Update at the bottom. The small text below the layout name does not reflect that a page was selected. So the problem is I can no longer assign layouts to pages.

I've tested this in both Firefox and Chrome. It was working a couple of weeks ago when I added the last raid team roster.

I've tried this with an existing layout that is linked to another page and as soon as Update is clicked the layout/page association is lost.

So currently I have no way to create new raid team pages as each has its own layout and I can't edit old ones. Please fix as I've just spent 3 hours working on the newest team's logo 😅

The new page is called Storm Squadron and the layout for it has the same name.

0 Likes

Ula Vii· 8 months ago

Another issue... I just tried to add the teams raids to the event calendar. For the reoccurring options I choose Weekly, Friday+Saturday until 5th Jan 2019. Below that it says "Summary Loading... until January 5, 2019" and then when I click Close to return to the main edit event page the reoccurring checkbox option label is set to "Reoccurs: Loading... until January 5, 2019". When I choose Update (or Create) to finalise the event it acts as if I did not pick Friday/Saturday and instead sets it to be weekly from the date I picked.

0 Likes

Ula Vii· 8 months ago

Tested in Edge browser as well now, does not work.

Is this just my guild's website?

0 Likes

Ula Vii· 8 months ago

Could you possibly make the layout change for me and I'll just avoid making new pages/layouts until a permanent fix is in place?

I just want the Storm Squadron page assigned to the Storm Squadron layout.

This is our new x16 person nightmare raid team. The new team has already caused a bit of a stir within the guild and I am concerned that their team roster page looking crap compared to the others will be seen as an insult by the guild leadership. I have explained that it is due to a bug but I'm sure some people will be muttering "how convenient".

For the calendar event repeat-days bug; I'll just have to make multiple clones of events for the calendar instead of picking days to repeat on but I can handle that myself.

Sorry to keep dropping bugs on you, I'm not intentionally finding them 😄

Thank you!

0 Likes

Staff

8 Toes· 8 months ago

Sorry for the late reply, it seems I missed the email notification >_<

This issue with the sections is now fixed, so you can do this now =) Will check the events issue now.

1 Like

Staff

8 Toes· 8 months ago

The events issue is now fixed as well =)

Hope you had a great weekend,

1 Like

Ula Vii· 8 months ago

Yaaay thank you 😀

0 Likes

Ater_Roseum· 8 months ago

I seem to be a bit confused on how to access the new IP that we need to direct our domain too. I see nothing in the site manager nor on our website which currently just times out.

Several weeks ago I kicked an officer. He is still holding a grudge and keeps trying to cause the guild grief. His latest attempt to waste our time is to threaten legal proceedings if we don't remove all trace of his personal details from our website. He's throwing the GDPR at us and claiming both Shivtr and myself will hear from his lawyers if his personal details are not removed. I already deactivated his account when he was kicked and now I have deleted it. In my mind it does not breach the GDPR since there is no information on there that can identify him as a person in the real world. His account name is "Marco". There are thousands of Marcos in the world. His email address is marco@somedomain.com (I made up the domain) so again, it does not give anything away to identify him. I wrote a post about it since he did something rather crappy yesterday that was very public so I wanted to address everything in one place. I don't usually get into long ones like that but it was hard to condense:

I highly doubt he has the intelligence to work out how to hire a lawyer and I also doubt he will go to any more effort to have his details removed. GDPR does not say posts made by the user have to be removed and I'd prefer if all his forum posts and mails were not deleted from the system as it could break some threads or at least break the conversational context.

Thought I'd post here to give you a headsup and see what you think.

Sorry about the trouble.

0 Likes

Ula Vii· 7 months ago

See he's erased now. Good riddance!

Thank you.

0 Likes

Ula Vii· 5 months ago

Hi, another problem has been showing itself recently. Uploaded images are not fully uploaded. I see this in the main image gallery and in the little thumbnails I upload as part of the calendar events. You can see an example of the later here:

The image gallery one happens when I upload a series of pictures and when I upload individual ones. There is no pattern and it is not consistent. If I upload a series of images then usually it's just one of them that will not be uploaded/linked correctly.

The images I'm uploaded tend to be jpg and the file size is less than 300KB (usually 200 or less) as I run them through an optimiser before uploading.

Nothing is different in the process I use. It is the same as before the image host was moved.

0 Likes

Staff

8 Toes· 5 months ago

This is likely an Amazon S3 issue, they have had some outages this past week. If its still happening for you this week please let me know =)

0 Likes

Ula Vii· 5 months ago

Same thing with one of the screenshots from today's server event. I uploaded 5 images as a group and the 2nd did not upload properly. You can see it here labeled as "Yavin 4". Note that there is a newer "Yavin 4" as I reuploaded the image but the one before that is blank.